05/30/2007
A Pass on Relativity
Recently, I was reappointed as historian of The Electrochemical Society (ECS), despite the fact that I’ve not done a whit of work in this capacity since 2002. That year was the 100th anniversary of the founding of ECS and in the preceding year I worked my tail off co-editing and authoring a centennial history of ECS. Hence I feel justified in considering myself a “real” historian. As such, there’s always been a bit of scientific history that mystified me. How come Einstein never received the Nobel Prize for his theories of relativity? After all, relativity changed our view of the way the universe operates, led to the prediction of black holes, to nuclear power and the atomic bomb and to a drastically changed view of time and space.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about Walter Isaacson’s new book on Einstein and how Einstein did get the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the photoelectric effect. The book details the intrigue behind the Nobel committee’s failure to recognize relativity. I was intrigued by the winners of the prizes that bracketed Einstein’s award. The 1922 Nobel award went to a true superstar, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who proposed that electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom, each orbit having a distinct energy. His model explained the lines appearing in optical spectra as due to light being generated or absorbed in the process of electrons hopping from one energy level to another.
On the other hand, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1920, the year before Einstein’s award, went to Swiss physicist Charles- Edouard Guillaume. I hadn’t heard of Guillaume until I read Isaacson’s book and I venture to guess that, unless they’ve specifically searched the Nobel records or were in the field of metal alloys, most physicists wouldn’t know the name either. When he received his award, Guillaume was Director of the International Bureau of Weights and Standards. One of this organization’s duties was to maintain standards of length, notably the meter, basis of the metric system.
The standard meter was originally housed in Paris as the distance between two marks on a bar of platinum. At the time, there was a lot of concern about precise measurements. As measurement techniques become more precise, one concern was that platinum expands or contracts with changes in temperature. Not only that, but platinum is expensive. Consequently, there was a quest to come up with an alloy cheaper than platinum that would not expand or contract significantly with changing temperature.
Guillaume was the leader in this quest and came up with invar, a relatively cheap nickel steel with a very low coefficient of expansion. It was essentially for invar that Guillaume received his Nobel Prize in Physics. I went on the official Nobel Prize Web site (nobelprize.org) and found Guillaume’s Nobel address. It was like a full-fledged paper in a journal, with detailed graphs and data. I can imagine the audience bored stiff unless they were in the metallurgical field.
To me, Guillaume’s work was metallurgy, not physics. I might note that when I worked for NACA, Lewis Flight Propulsion Lab in Cleveland back in 1950-1952 I was classified as a “physical metallurgist”. Don’t get me wrong – Guillaume’s work was very impressive and important. In addition to the invar work, he also made an alloy with a coefficient of expansion that matched the expansion of glass. I used metal-to-glass seals on occasion in my past and probably owe a debt to Guillaume for that work. He was obviously a first class metallurgist or materials scientist. However, it doesn’t seem that the invention of an alloy ranks with the achievements in physics of Einstein and Bohr.
So, why did Guillaume win the Nobel before Einstein? Einstein was first nominated for the Nobel in 1910 by Wilhelm Ostwald, a Nobel laureate in chemistry who had once turned down Einstein as a job applicant. The 5-member Nobel committee during the period from 1910-1922 included 3 members from Uppsala University in Sweden. These three were all experimentalists in a university devoted to the development of precise experimental and measuring techniques. Although Einstein gained further nominations as the years passed, these experimentalists were unimpressed by his esoteric theories.
When 1919’s solar eclipse confirmed his prediction that light from a star would be bent by the Sun, Einstein became a household name and clearly the 1920 prize was in order. However, Svante Arrehnius, committee chairman, wrote a report against Einstein, utilizing arguments put forward by Einstein’s anti-Semitic critics such as Philipp Lenard. (Recall that Nobelist Lenard was a critic of “Jewish science” and later held a post in the Nazi regime.) The arguments carried the day and Guillaume got the 1920 Prize. Isaacson quotes science historian Robert Marc Friedman: “…. it was remarkable to find Guillaume’s accomplishment, based on routine study and modest theoretical finesse, recognized as a beacon of achievement. Even those who opposed relativity theory found Guillaume a bizarre choice.”
So, what happened in 1921? Surprisingly, nothing! Einstein received 14 nominations and had the support of theoreticians and experimentalists alike. Unbelievably, the Nobel committee assigned Alvar Gullstrand of Uppsala to write a report on relativity even though Gullstrand, a professor of ophthalmology and 1911 Nobelist in medicine, wasn’t exactly the type I would expect to be expert in the math and physics of relativity. His 50- page report claimed that the eclipse experiments weren’t valid and Einstein’s explanation of Mercury’s orbit was questionable. Gullstrand was known for his precise optical measurements and Einstein’s saying that the length of a measurement rod varies relative to moving observers was too much for Gullstrand to swallow. In spite of Gullstrand’s suspect report, he was a very popular professor. The committee was reluctant to oppose him and voted to pass on the 1921 award and bank it for another year!
If so, how did Einstein get his 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics? By 1922, it was clear that not giving Einstein the prize was becoming a reflection on the Nobel rather than on Einstein. Fortunately, an Uppsala theoretical physicist, Carl Wilhelm Oseen, joined the committee. A friend of Gullstrand, Oseen helped Gullstrand see the error of his ways. Furthermore, Oseen realized that relativity was too controversial and he proposed that Einstein receive the prize for the photoelectric effect.
Oseen played it cool. As we discussed a couple weeks ago, Einstein’s major photoelectric effect contribution was to propose that light travels in quanta (now called photons). Oseen, however, was careful to push for Einstein receiving the award for “the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” Note the emphasis on law, not theory! Oseen paved the way for the committee to give Einstein the belated 1921 prize, while also awarding the 1922 prize to Bohr, a one-two punch that would recognize the two greatest theoretical physicists of the time. Later, the 1923 Nobel Prize would go to Robert Millikan for his work on the photoelectric effect at the University of Chicago. In 1922, Arrhenius, a convert after meeting Einstein personally, cited Millikan’s work as “rigorously” and “brilliantly” confirming Einstein’s law of the photoelectrical effect.
There was another big winner of the Nobel Prize, which then amounted to the equivalent of about $32,250. In 1918, desperate to obtain a divorce, Einstein offered his first wife Mileva all of the money he would receive when he received the Nobel Prize. (Einstein, who would marry his cousin Elsa, wasn’t modest about his chances!) Mileva received the prize money in the form of trusts in Switzerland and in the U.S.A. Einstein took an active role in distributing the monies from the trusts until Mileva’s death in 1948. As with relativity, the handling of the trusts engendered much controversy but it appears that Einstein did conscientiously try to protect and provide for Mileva and his mentally disturbed son Eduard, who lived with Mileva.
Nothing was simple when it came to Einstein!
Allen F. Bortrum
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